The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many devices that have been conventionally connected to wired networks are more and more configured with wireless communications interfaces to allow the devices to be used in wireless communications environments. For example, many printers may be configured with both a wired network interface, such as an Ethernet card, and a wireless communications interface, such as an 802.11 wireless interface card. In this situation, users on a wired network may print to the printer. Users who are not connected to the wired network can also print to the printer using wireless communications. It may be more convenient for laptop computer users to print to the printer using a wireless communications link instead of connecting their laptop computers to the wired network.
One drawback with devices having wireless communications interfaces is that they are susceptible to attack when they are first installed but not yet configured with appropriate security. For example, wireless-capable devices are often initially configured with no security or with a default set of security parameters that are easily obtained from manufacturers or other sources. This creates vulnerabilities that can be exploited by third parties. For example, third parties may use the well-known security parameters to access a newly installed wireless device and make unauthorized changes to the configuration. Sophisticated third parties may also change security parameters and permissions to “hijack” the device. Because of these concerns, many wireless devices are configured with a wired network interface to allow the devices to be configured over a wired network. Wireless communications are disabled until the devices are properly configured by administrative personnel. This represents an added expense for equipment that may only be used once during initial configuration. Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for configuring wireless devices that does not suffer from limitations of prior approaches.